Fashion in the field

Patrick (my brother, a journalist) loves conducting interviews.  He describes it as ‘a socially acceptable way of prying into other people’s lives’.  While I’m not sure that interviewing lawyers and government officials about international refugee law offers quite the same voyeuristic opportunities, it certainly does provide some interesting perspectives on the diversity of life and work in Africa.  From interviewing staff at Kenya’s largest refugee NGO – in a rundown old suburban house, with plywood screens for walls and electricity dropping in and out – to meeting with one of UNHCR’s regional representatives – in a shiny new megastructure in the lush green hills of Nairobi’s expensive northern outskirts, bound by retractable security barriers and landscaped gardens, and with the whiff of cow dung and coffee plantations in my nose.

This huge variety in interview environments creates one rather significant challenge for me – deciding what to wear.  Dress too casual for the UNHCR and I will look like an amateur student, dress too smart for some NGOs and I will seem out of touch and unable to comprehend the realities of refugees on the ground.  Add to that the interminable roadworks taking place in Nairobi at the moment, which mean that anything showing dust is a no-no and open-toed shoes will bring me home with black feet.  Add to that the issue of security – no jewellery, a cheap looking but suitably professional handbag, and nothing that makes me look like I’m likely to be carrying much cash... Unless, like yesterday, I’m travelling by car to meet a High Court judge at a five-star hotel restaurant, in which case scrounge around for the smartest, poshest, least creased outfit I can muster, whip out the new handbag and don the heels!

Luckily for me, I had anticipated just these sorts of challenges before leaving home.  I have been working on my ‘Africa wardrobe’ for almost 10  years now – ever since I saw The Constant Gardener – and progressively building my stock of light weight but suitably modest short-sleeved blouses and calf length skirts.  Too bad most of them wore out before I made it here.  I also spent a full day in Sydney with Mum experimenting with different combinations of clothes, shoes, belts and scarves, all with a combined weight of less than 23 kilos.  So when I dressed and went down to breakfast this morning and one of my housemates told me I looked ‘totally Africa chic’ in my short-sleeved apricot blouse, cream skirt and brown sandals, I was secretly pretty chuffed.

So here, for your viewing pleasure, I present some selected examples from Tamara Wood’s ‘Africa 2012’ collection.  Now I just need to decide what to wear for my excursion on Monday, accompanying a legal aid outreach team on their visit to Eastleigh, the Nairobi suburb home to a large population of Somali refugees and affectionately (or disparagingly, depending on your point of view) known as ‘Little Mogadishu’.

A typical, NGO/university interview outfit - the mini yellow cardigan is great for
making sleeveless tops decent and protecting shoulders from sunburn.

Everyday Joburg street wear - great for days off and posing with funny signs.

Light weight cardigan - good for warm, sunny African days.  The cream colour is
 perfect for those  meals that involve eating barbecued meat with your hands....

Probably my favourites dress and cardigan - great for the cooler climate of Cape Town.  Smart
enough for an interview but comfy enough for admiring the view from the top of Table Mountain!

Dressing up for a jazz safari. 

Layering.  The only way to keep warm when you packed for summer and its still only spring. 

Wearing every item of clothing you brought and your boyfriend's jacket.  The
only way to keep warm when it turns freezing and all you have is sandals!

African safari meets hip hop.  I love this hat - I'd wear it every day but I might
 as well wear a sign that says "Hi, I'm a tourist, mug me for my money belt". 

A new purchase from Joburg's Rosebank rooftop market.  This dress has just the right
 amount of Africa without looking ridiculous accompanied by red hair and freckles.

For the love of elephants

Nairobi is the only city in the world with its very own National Park – the main gate to Nairobi National Park is only 10 km from the city centre.  The park as a whole covers 117 square kms and is home to rhinos, giraffe, leopard, cheetah, zebra, wildebeest and lions.  Being so close to the city, it’s tempting to wonder whether it has not been set up as a tourist attraction, but the animals in Nairobi have been here much longer than the humans.  In the early C20th, city residents carried guns to protect themselves from lions.  This led the colonial government to start building fences, in an attempt to confine the animals to the west and south of the city, and in 1946 the National Park was established.

The National Park is not entirely fenced, in an attempt to keep open the animals’ migration routes to southern Kenya and the Masai Mara.  However increasing human development means the park is now almost surrounded and this poses a serious threat to animals who rely on the migration corridors to access food and water year round.  Alongside this, however, the park provides an ideal location for some truly incredible wildlife conservation projects.  On Sunday I visited two of them.

The Kenya Giraffe Centre is a large reserve, set up next to the National Park by Jock and Betty Leslie-Melville in 1979.  The Centre was originally established rescue and breed the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe – only found in Kenya and distinguishable by the fact that its patterning does not continue below the knee.  When the Centre was established there were only around 120 Rothschild’s giraffes in the wild – there are now over 300 and the Centre has reintroduced them to a number of Kenya’s National Parks.  In addition to this conservation work, the Centre now provides conversation education programs to Kenya school children – the admission fee (and any money spent in the gift shop!) goes to ensuring these programs remain free and there are huge displays of children’s conservation-related artwork posted around the centre.  I love giraffes, and it always amazes how such an oddly designed creature (Dad says they look like they were designed by a committee…) can move with such grace.  But equally enrapturing were the warthogs (arguably even more oddly designed!) who rummaged on their knees at the giraffes’ feet during feeding time, snaffling up any pellets missed by the giraffe.

As well as the Giraffe Centre, I visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which runs a nursery for orphaned elephants within the National Park’s boundaries.  From there it rescues and cares for elephants orphaned by poaching, human encroachment or other causes, before ultimately releasing them back into the wild in Tsavo East National Park.  The Trust is named after the late husband of Daphne Sheldrick – Daphne was the first person in the world to successfully rear an elephant separated from its mother in infancy.  Working out the right formula for food and care was a rudimentary matter of trial and error and in the early days it involved many failures. 

The overwhelming impression I was left with after my visit to the elephant nursery was of the fundamental importance to elephants of family.  In the wild, elephants move in large matriarchal herds, usually composed of females and young males.  Male elephants only leave the herd at maturity – somewhere between 15 and 20 years.  This makes the family, and especially the mother, absolutely crucial to a young elephant’s survival.  The keepers at the nursery explain that when a young elephant is found on its own, it is nearly always because the mother has died or been killed – mother elephants never abandon their young.  The relationship is even stronger in reverse – the Trust’s website describes the heartbreaking loss of one of its early orphans who, being the first to have been successfully reared using human baby formula, later died of grief when Daphne went away for a week to attend a friend’s wedding.  Losing not just one mother, but two, was just too much.  The website also tells the story of one of the nursery’s current residents – Rukinga – who was found by a local scout group roaming with a herd of cattle, so desperate was he for company after losing his herd.  (You can read Rukinga’s story and even see a video of him here.)

The process of rearing, rehabilitation and reintegration into the wild will take a total of around 8 years.  At the nursery, the elephant orphans are attended to by their keepers 24 hours a day – they even sleep with them in specially converted sheds, where they wake every 3 hours to feed them milk.  Each elephant sleeps with a different keeper each night, to prevent them becoming too attached to any one individual.  When they are between 2 and 3 they will be moved to the adolescents’ reserve at Tsavo East, where they will go out daily with their keepers to visit the wild herds in Tsavo and learn their new environment.  This continues until the young orphan is ‘adopted’ by a new herd – a process which can take up to 4 or 5 years.  One of the keepers explained to us that a successful adoption depends on a number of factors – including the existing herd’s composition and personality!

When travelling, as well as at home, I usually do my best to avoid animal-related tourist attractions, fearing the conditions that they will be kept in for the sake of human entertainment.  So it was such a joy to be able to visit two amazing conservation projects and witness these incredible creatures and know that the money I spent would be used to continue the good work.  And now I am off to find out what I have to do to become an elephant keeper…

The Rothschild's giraffe - unlike the reticulated
and Masaai giraffes it has no patterning below the knee.

Young female and male giraffes having a wander... and a stretch!

Maybe I should have a prize for the best caption here....

In the background you can see Giraffe Manor - you can stay here and wake to a
giraffe peering through your window... all for a mere USD1000 a night!

Enter scavenging warthog.

If my favourite animal wasn't already the elephant, I think it would be the warthog.

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust - public access is limited to just one hour a day, the rest
 of the time the elephant orphans hang out together and with their keepers.

The infant group - the elephants in this shot are all about 3-6 months olds.

The infants are fed a vegetable-based human baby formula.
They can finish this bottle in about 5 seconds. 

Elephant hugs.  They clearly adore the keepers, and each other!

How could you not love a creature like this? What a poser! 

Number 1 fan. 

The older group - these elephants are mostly 1 or 2 years old. 

Elephant love :-)

Nairobi

Well Nairobi has so far failed utterly to live up to its harsh reputation.  Not only is it a far more relaxed city than the Lonely Planet nickname ‘Nairobbery’ would have you believe, it is also beautiful.  The streets are lush and green, the air is clean and the people are incredibly friendly – ‘hello sister/my friend/mzungu!’ (Mzungu means foreigner, the literal Swahili translation is ‘one who wanders aimlessly’.)  From my room at the British Institute Guesthouse in Kileleshwa, just 25 minutes walk from the CBD, I can’t hear a single car.  And when I wake up in the morning I look out my window to trees, blue sky, birds and monkeys!  Nairobi, I love you.

I am well aware that the Nairobi I have experienced so far is a far cry from the Nairobi experienced by all its residents.  To the south, for example, lies Kibera – one of the world’s biggest slums, made famous by the movie The Constant Gardener.  And security is definitely an issue – I was frisked and had my bag searched at the entrance to the Yaya Shopping Centre this morning.  But there’s no question that the streets here are friendlier and more relaxed than those of Jo’burg.  For a start, they are full of people.  Unlike the fortresses of Jo’burg’s northern suburbs, where the view consists of high walls and cars and pedestrians are rare, here life is happening on the streets – people walking to work, chatting to neighbours, selling fruit and plants and barbequed corn (and greeting the mzungu!).  And while the high electric fences still exist, at least in my neck of the woods, they seem somehow more of a relic than the embodiment of entrenched divides and paranoia.

My lodgings are in the Guesthouse of the British Institute of East Africa (BIEA).  The Institute started in 1960, with a focus on Archaeology and History, but now supports research in the broader humanities, including Law.  It runs its own projects, as well as providing a base for visiting researchers conducting research not only in Kenya but in other East African countries as well.   Perhaps most fortuitously, the big old house within the BIEA compound is run as a Guesthouse, providing cheap accommodation and fantastic wifi to people like me!

The Guesthouse is really like a very large sharehouse – from the shared living and kitchen areas, to the name tags on milk cartons, to the big sign above the sink exhorting people to clean up after themselves.  My housemates are one Kenyan, two Americans, a Canadian and a Brit.  Most of them are quite a bit younger than me, a not so subtle reminder that is now some years since the height of my sharehousing days…  But they are all lovely and welcoming, and a wonderful source of information on how to navigate Nairobi.

As far as work goes, I have hit the ground running in Nairobi.  Day 1 – guest lecture at the university.  Day 2 – first interview.  The lecture went well, and the students – all of them working full time in legal practice while they undertake their Master – were a dynamic, engaged and inquiring group, just what every teacher wants.  In fact, I think that listening to their questions and discussion was probably more useful to me than my presentation on Research Methods was to them!  For my research, I have already lined up another five interviews – with UNHCR and a number of NGO representatives – for the coming week.  After these I will decide whether to stay in Nairobi, try to visit one of the refugee camps, or make a quick side trip to Tanzania or Uganda.  But for the rest of this week I plan to check out the CBD, visit the Museum and hopefully pay a visit to one of the excellent conservation projects on Nairobi’s outskirts.  I just need to decide whether it will be the Giraffe Centre, which was established by the grandson of a Scottish earl in 1979 and has singlehandedly saved the Rothschild giraffe from extinction, or the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, where David and Daphne Sheldrick pioneered techniques for raising orphaned elephants and rhinos and reintroducing them to the wild.

A room with a view.  The monkeys think so too - this
morning I woke to one peering at me from the rooftop.

Walking to the local shops in Kileleshwa, 3 km from the CBD.  It's like walking in the
countryside!  Except for where there are roadworks - then it's like walking in a dust storm.

Roadside trading.  Almost one in three roadside stalls in Nairobi seems to be
selling plants, which would explain the beautiful greenery everywhere.